Job Bias Law Not Retroactive, Justices Rule : Workplace: Civil rights advocates denounce the Supreme Court decision, while corporate lawyers express relief.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday saved employers from potential liability in thousands of job discrimination cases, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 does not apply to bias that occurred before the law took effect.

In an 8-1 decision, they announced that the court will not apply the law retroactively unless Congress writes into the measure a precise provision extending it to pending lawsuits.

Civil rights advocates denounced the ruling as a new blow to victims of workplace bias. Business lawyers said they are relieved that companies will not be forced to pay for past mistakes.

After a two-year fight with congressional Democrats, President George Bush on Nov. 21, 1991, reluctantly signed the measure, which made it easier for workers to prove they were victims of discrimination and, for the first time, gave women the right to damages in such cases.

Bush stressed then that the law did not apply to thousands of pending claims. Democratic lawmakers, however, had wanted to apply the measure retroactively and had written such a rule into a 1990 version of the bill that was vetoed by Bush.

The compromise version that finally became law said nothing definite about retroactivity, and in the end, the question was left to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, the justices said that only recent acts of discrimination are covered.

“The presumption against retroactive legislation is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court. It might even be unconstitutional, he said, to impose new punitive-damage verdicts on employers for past discrimination.

Only retiring Justice Harry A. Blackmun dissented, saying there is “nothing unjust” about forcing an employer to pay damages for discrimination that has been illegal for 30 years.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 first outlawed employer discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. But generally, victims of such bias could win only reinstatement to their jobs and back pay.

By the 1980s, this once-powerful weapon against job bias had begun to seem somewhat feeble. Women’s rights advocates, for example, pointed out that victims of on-the-job sexual harassment could not win much except a judge’s order calling for a halt to the harassment.

In 1989, when congressional Democrats pushed for a new bill to counter high court rulings that had made it harder for workers to win discrimination cases, civil rights advocates pressed for new damage remedies as well.

The final bill gave employees the right to have jury trials and set an escalating scale for damages based on the size of a company or agency. At the top end, employers with more than 500 workers can be forced to pay up to $300,000 to each employee who has suffered from illegal discrimination.

Though no precise figures were available, lawyers said that as many as several thousand cases could have been reopened if the high court had deemed the law to apply retroactively.

Civil rights lawyers argued that a majority of Congress favored retroactive application.

Tuesday’s ruling decided the case of Barbara Landgraf, a Tyler, Tex., woman who was sexually harassed by a co-worker at a film-processing plant in 1985. She filed suit against her employer, and a judge agreed that she had been a victim of sexual harassment.

Nonetheless, he ruled in May, 1991, that she was not entitled to damages. In Landgraf vs. USI Film Products, the high court affirmed that judgment, saying the law did not apply to offenses that took place in 1985.